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lesson

Custom Instructions in ChatGPT

When working with AI assistants, the more they know about you, the better.

You have preferences for how you format code, the tools you use, and more. For example, if you're a JavaScript developer, you don't want to ask your AI assistant how to parse JSON and have it give you some Python code. The m

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Transcript

00:00 One thing that I've found with the AI assistants is the more they know about you, the better. And so like you've got your own preferences on how you format your code, you've got your own preferences on the tools that you use, like you don't want to say, "Hey, how do you parse JSON and have it give you some Python if you're a JavaScript developer?" And so like the more

00:18 information that you can give the AI about yourself, the less specific you have to be in your prompt. So I can say something like, "How do I convert a form into form data?"

00:30 And chat-gpt will answer this for me in using some of the context that I have given it before. So it's a lot more specific to the stuff that I'm interested in. And the way that you do

00:47 this with chat-gpt is using a custom instruction here. So here you can tell chat-gpt a little bit about yourself and the things that you're interested in. I have like the tools that I'm using, I've got my prettier config even, and a bunch of other things about myself that would be really

01:06 useful for chat-gpt to know about so that it can answer my questions a little bit more specifically. And then I give it some specific instructions on how I like it to respond. I want it to be terse, I want it to be kind of more casual, I want it to call me Kent if it's going to refer or talk to

01:24 me in that way. And all sorts of other pieces where I'm fine-tuning as I interact with this AI assistant. I see that it does this thing, I'm like, "Ah, I don't want it to do that in the future," but I also don't want to tell it to not do that in the future. So I just put it in the

01:41 instructions and now my prompts can be a little bit more terse. So spending some time customizing your AI assistant with some instructions like this can give it more context about you and your own preferences and hopefully help improve the responses that you get. So customize your AI